The RetroBeat: Strider is the craziest 16-bit game I never played

When I turned on the Genesis Mini that Sega sent me, I first went for Mega Man: The Wily Wars (for reasons I’ve detailed before on this column). After that, I played the familiar classics: Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco the Dolphin, and so on. Then I decided to try some of the games that I’ve never played in the retro console’s 42-title library. I first went to Strider, originally an arcade game created for Capcom that got a Genesis port in 1990.

This was during the pre-Sonic era of the Gensis, back when Sega was still touting the machine as the place for arcade-perfect ports. So Strider make a lot of sense for the console. But despite being a huge Genesis fan, I never played the sidescroller action game. The only reason I even knew of Strider’s existence is because the character is a fighter in Marvel vs. Capcom 2.